Marsch, PhD, who directs the Psychiatric Research Center and
Center for Technology and Behavioral Health at Dartmouth
University’s Geisel School of Medicine.

“There just aren’t enough addiction treatment specialists,”says Marsch. “And it’s really tough for more traditionalmedical settings to embrace behavioral health: They don’t havespecialists, and primary-care doctors don’t have the expertise.”Even in specialty treatment centers, she says, clinicians canhave enormous case loads. There’s a lot of turnover. Plus, in themore complex context of real life, evidence-based treatmentsdon’t always get delivered the way they were designed in a labenvironment and may be less effective.

Technology can help, says Marsch. For example, Marsch
and colleagues have found that substituting a Web-based
intervention for some of the standard counseling methadone
patients received resulted in significantly higher rates of
abstinence than standard treatment alone (Journal of Substance
Abuse Treatment,2014).

“If you offered some of your interventions via acomputerized system, you might free up clinicians to havemore time to spend with people who are in crisis or have moreintensive care needs,” says Marsch. “Or you could see morepeople with the same number of clinicians.”To Potter, all this activity by psychologists is a positive sign.

“The number of psychologists working in addiction in direct
clinical care is relatively small,” she says. “They need more of
a role, to be honest. What’s important is that we understand
how to intervene, how to customize treatment for patients’
particular circumstances and how to provide them with the best
behavioral treatment we know that’s based on evidence.” n